love built it and love will tear it down

it's just a room
with walls
for limits
and a glass ceiling
to hold us in

it's just a system
with rules
for order
and structures
to control our beliefs and our behaviors

Love built it
your genitals commodified it
your white skin colonized it
your arrogance organized it
and you hoarded it's power
and Love will tear it down

Love built it and Love will tear it down

it was never meant to be reined in
it was never meant to be exclusive
it was never meant to be given limits
it was never meant to oppress
it was never yours to dominate

Love is high and wide and deep
Love holds and knows and sees
Love is free and freely given
Love is you and Love is me
Love is our bodies in all complexity
in pleasure and in pain
in hope and in despair
Love is imminent
Love is human and divine
Love is presence
Love is mystery

Love built it and Love will tear it down

on choosing to leave

i moved to seattle when i was 21. it was the tail end of february, and i spent at least a month without a job and only knowing one other person in the city. finding a church to engage in became one of my highest priorities. it wasn't until that summer in 2008 that i stumbled upon Convergence, the young adult ministry at University Presbyterian Church.

very quickly, i found people who wanted to know me and people i wanted to know. within two years, i joined a small group, went on mission trips, participated in leadership and became an intern. i had found my people, my place, my home.

during that time, i grew profoundly in my faith. i found the direction and the courage to own all of the person that i am and to return to school with a vision for my life. i experienced God in ways that shook me to my core and changed me forever.

in 2012, Convergence ended. my pastor left. the service i attended on sunday was cancelled. my community was gone.

still, i did not leave. as droves of my Convergence friends left for churches that had programs that engaged them more, i decided to press into a difficult space and stay with the church that i had invested so much in. there were a couple handfuls of people left from the community i had built, and we banded together.

between 2008 and 2014 i participated in Convergence, the 7pm service, deacon ministry, several mission trips, stephen ministry, high school ministry, children's ministry, and more. i know and am connected to people of all ages within this congregation. in many ways, i have grown to love all of the people i have encountered along this journey. while Convergence is what drew me in, it was all of these people, and particularly the families that i connected with this past year that have made UPC a home for me over the past 6 years.



with all of this said, and with a very heavy heart, i made the decision to leave this home. my last sunday at UPC was in september.



i want to speak a little bit about what this process has been like for me. when i left, i was fully prepared to begin to engage in another church context. however, within a week i realized that wasn't going to happen right away.

my heart is broken. it is broken for the faces that i no longer get to see. it is broken for the relationships that i am no longer a part of. it is broken for the dear friends that i have that are still stuck in a system that causes them pain and frustration.

my soul is healing. it is healing from the hurt of a community that chose not to listen to my voice. it is healing from the wounds of having to shut of my soul and convictions in order to enter the sanctuary. it is healing from a year of encountering God in every place but the sanctuary.

i am grieving the loss of part of my community and figuring out how to worship God in church again. this is a painful process. though i felt a clear sense from God that it was time to leave, i was not ready for all that leaving entailed.

i chose to leave. and i am dealing with the consequences of that choice, both positive and negative.

we're all in this together

this week has served as a profound reminder for me. entering into celebration with friends embarking on a new adventure together, and sitting in pain with friends faced with unexpected grief. it is no surprise to me that joy and grief are so closely experienced. however, i have been processing this with a new perspective recently. i have learned more about myself, and begun to understand why i am so sensitive to these two emotions in particular.

but moreover, as we enter Holy Week, i am reminded that these two emotions, joy and grief, are at the heart of our faith.

during this week we walk with Jesus through his Passion. we are faced with the reality of our own brokenness as we betray him with Judas, deny him with Peter, and call for his crucifixion with the masses.

then his body moves to the cross, and we realize our mistake. that the one we have crucified is the One who has so profoundly identified with us, performed our existence in such a way as to invite us to fullness and freedom.

and we must sit here. for a time. this is Good Friday. grief. pain. we must must sit in this space for anything that takes place next to have any significance.

so we sit in a place of grief. we wonder how to move on. we wonder how there could possibly be any hope left. we wonder how God could have forsaken us. this is okay. this is part of the rhythm.

because then, in the midst of our grief, we go to the tomb...only to find the stone rolled away and the funeral clothes unwrapped and empty. we turn back, confused, and there he is. he is alive, he calls us by name, and he tells us there is more. there is hope. there is joy.

it strikes me that this is the essence of the human experience. the invitation of Holy Week is to experience the fullness of what it means to be human, with the One who shows us exactly what that means. we walk the road together, you and me, bound up and together in the life of Jesus.

grief. joy. these are the reality of humanness. they are true of every experience and iteration of what it means to be human. grief and joy are what bind us to each other and what bind us to Christ. because in this one man, the particular and the universal are made one. our differences are at once honored and done away with.

because we are all in this together.

sexuality and identity

year two can be summed up or categorized by three themes:
creativity
sexuality
formation

nearly every conversation i seem to be having is about one or more of these topics, and often, all three.

that said, i feel very strongly that i have some work to do. perhaps some healing, maybe some confession, certainly some articulating of my own story that helps me to find clarity. there is going to be a lot of uncertainty on this journey. i will probably say a lot of things that will be in process. i may not want to land on them for a long time, or incorporate them as axiomatic for my life, but they might be where i am at any given moment. i will also be raising and addressing what i think are valid, honest, and important questions. because of these things, and because if i am posting it might keep me accountable to actually do the work, i think that i will be posting this journey here - but with some limitations.

first, i wont be advertising on my facebook. this will most likely severely limit my audience. that's okay. this means that the people reading it will be people who want to hear it, not just people who stumble upon my post in their newsfeed.

second, i reserve the right to password protect any post i desire. usually it will be because it is intensely vulnerable for me to share, and i am unsure about it. if i decide to password protect a post, my hope is that it doesn't stay password protected for too long, just long enough to run it by trusted sources to affirm that it is worthwhile to the conversation.

ADDENDUM: third, my hope is to be able to experience some of this process creatively as well. that may mean that you see more poetry (Lord willing), perhaps artwork, etc. know that in sharing those things i am simply trying to articulate my own process, not necessarily contribute to a larger conversation.

so...here it goes.

love

love is a funny feeling, a heavy word, and a powerful action. lately i have been wondering if love ever gets old. is there a point at which you can have too much love? do you know how words and phrases, when they are used too much, lose their meaning and power? could that happen with love?

if someone held your face in their hands and looked you in the eyes and said "i love you" every day for the rest of your life, would you ever get tired of hearing it?

alternatively, if you never heard someone tell you they love you for the rest of your life, would you miss it?

has love become one of those words that we say to each other so often that we don't really hear them or feel the full impact of their meaning?

i am amazed every day that my capacity for love keeps growing. i feel so full of love that sometimes it hurts, like growing pains, as if there is some sort of container inside of me that gets stretched bigger and bigger with each encounter.

there has been enough loss of life and relationship along my journey for me to realize that speaking aloud to another person that they are loved, and allowing that to carry its full weight, is an opportunity that we don't have forever. people die, people move, friendships end and people change. in light of this, my hope is that others look back on whatever time they spent with me and know that for whatever period of time we had together, i loved them.

i use the word love frequently with my family and friends. and when i say it, i mean it. i hope that it never becomes a word that loses its meaning when people hear it from my mouth. i hope that when i say it, i convey the fullness of its meaning with the way that i live and treat others. i hope that the people who have filled me with so much love know how deeply their love has seeped into my soul, and that i don't take it for granted.

full.

the vulnerability of lament

i was terrible about blogging my way through practicum last quarter, even though i wanted to share my journey through lament.

the truth of the matter is that i hit a point where sitting in the process of lament was way too hard. actually, i think it was more the case that the process of lament was doing its job, and the very act of lamenting led me to joy. but this is my effort to debrief the experience.

i went into the experience knowing full well that lament is not something that we do well or often. it occurred to me pretty early on that i think part of the reason why lament is so difficult is because it requires us to be vulnerable. it requires us to be honest with ourselves, and it requires us to be honest with the One we believe has somehow wronged us. when the poet of Lamentations cries out to God, he is incredibly detailed about the hurts and the wrongs his people have experienced, as well as the sin they have committed. the poet is also incredibly direct with God about how God has done them wrong, shares these intimate hurts with God, all in the midst of God's silence. and the poet doesn't get an immediate response.

so, what choice did i have but to ask God to help me to be vulnerable as i discovered lament. i asked God to take me to those deepest places of myself that needed to be brought to the surface, to be grieved, and to eventually be let go of. there was plenty of stuff to keep me occupied, most of which had to do with church, but there was one thing that came up that i wasn't anticipating having to deal with at this point in time.

it became apparent that it was time to lament my singleness - or my lack of a significant other. this still feels strange to say.

for at least a year or so, i have had this feeling (in my gut, my heart, my soul, wherever you want to place it) that perhaps the life i had always simply expected is not the life i am meant to live.

there was a time during my angsty teenage years when i would have said i had no desire to get married or have kids. but that was just a phase. deep down, i always assumed i would get married young and have a kid or two by the time i reached the aged of 27.

alas, here i am sans children and a husband. not only that, but when i am truly honest with myself about what i see in my future, i don't see those things. i am not even sure i still hope for those things.

then there's the fact that our culture emphasizes marriage and family in a way that is incredibly ostracizing to older single people. the older you get and the longer you remain unmarried, the weirder you are and the less value you have. the church is no exception to this. at the same time, when i attempt to share these sorts of thoughts with friends, they tend to be incredibly dismissive. when i mention that i'm not sure if i will ever get married, people are really quick to respond with something like "you just haven't met the right guy," or "it's not the right time." these things may or may not be true, but statements like these give me permission to tighten my grip ever so slightly, instead of holding these things loosely and giving them to God, and they don't honor where i feel God has me now.

the hard and fast truth is that at this point in time, i can't imagine myself getting married.

i realized i had to lament this fact for a few reasons. first, i am an extroverted person. i don't enjoy being alone. i would never actively choose to live alone. and yet, if i don't get married, odds are most of my friends around me will, and i will run out of roommates. second, i love children, and i would love to be a mom. i love watching them grow and learn, and i love what they have to teach me. there are certainly ways to have children without being married, but ideally, i would have a partner for parenting. third, and i hate that this is a concern of mine, but the adventures that i want to have around the world are made easier with a partner, particularly one who is a man. though it is not impossible to do the kind of work i want to do on my own, i would feel safer (and probably more sane) with someone by my side.

i am lamenting singleness because when you take marriage out of the equation, each of these concerns becomes that much more scary. figuring out the details of how my life will work in each of these areas without being married gets more difficult.

so here i am, being honest with myself about where i am at. this is as far as i have gotten in the process. i anticipate many more conversations with God about what this actually means, many more moments of watching sappy movies when i think to myself that i am being too hasty, and perhaps some tears shed. but this is the direction i feel God moving me for now...to let the idea of marriage and a family go. that's not to say God wont change my mind later in life, but all i can do is be faithful in the present.

on the bright side, i have no shortage of family in my life. my family of origin and my family of choice are both a means of grace for me. they continue to remind me that family...and love...is bigger than we give it credit for.

summertime goals

I have some big plans for summer. number one is to simply enjoy life with no homework, no assigned reading, and no guided theological reflection. how am I going to embrace this time? by giving myself homework, assigned reading and topics for reflection...like the nerd that I am.

so, I have already posted my reading list (which I reserve the right to add to or subtract from at any time), but here are some of the other things that I hope to accomplish this summer.

• create at least one mixed-media artistic piece. for me, this usually means some combination of acrylic, watercolor, charcoal, sketch, magazine cut-outs and mod podge. I haven't done one of these in about five years, but it has been my most satisfying artistic endeavor to date.
  
• write a blog post synthesizing my theology of Scripture and why I think it is important to understand the role of Scripture in the life of the worshiping community. this will hopefully serve a dual purpose: as a tool for me to process and organize my thoughts and hopefully as a resource for people at my church that are considering this question in light of some major topics our denomination is considering.
• hike. this one is self-explanatory, right?
• simply be with friends who are family and family who are friends. you may have noticed that I am in grad school. the funny thing about grad school is that it monopolizes a lot of my time, and it will most likely only consume more as I get further into my program. as a result, I have neglected many of the relationships that I have held dear over the last five years, and I hope to spend time wisely this summer rebuilding some of those relationships and continuing to develop the ones that I have been able to maintain this year.
• craft a poem/hymn/song/(whatever it turns into) inspired by Brother Emmanuel's book Love, Imperfectly Known
• design and get my next tattoo.

I will most likely be adding more to this list, but here is what I have so far.